On Wednesday 11 April 2007, Michael Schneider wrote:
> Hi, Matthew!
> My opinion: One can, of course, always use a custom approach of the form
> you and Alan proposed - it works. But I suppose that many people will
> dislike the situation to always build their own custom list types, while
> there is already a lot of collection vocabulary in RDF, which they can
> only use either in a very limited way, like for rdf:Bag and friends, or
> not at all, like for rdf:List.
The other option would be to treat the owl in a more 'syntactic' way, and have
a sensible (and DL-safe) macro system that expands things like OWLList and
OWLListMemberAtIndex and so on into a fully OWL-DL friendly representation.
You would write what looks natural to you, and this would be expanded
on-the-fly into axioms that are plain OWL. This approach doesn't make too
much sense if you want each entity in the owl to correspond to a real-world
entity or concept, but this distinction can be made explicit by annotating
entities as being either real-world or modelling in motivation.
Of course, the showstopper with this is that there isn't a recognised
owl-friendly macros system available right now.
Matthew
>
> Cheers,
> Michael